An ‘information seeker/s’ refers to any person of any age, gender, nationality or coming from any demographic group. These aforementioned persons are also those whom are conducting informal or formal research from home, school/college/university/company or any environment in which a computer operates. This also includes mainframe computers, mobile phones, personal digital assistants and any other device in which information may be sought.
There are novice and non-novice information-seekers and researchers who experience difficulties using databases, library catalogues, on-line journals and the internet because of the lack of recognition of appropriate search terms, various methods of interrogation and the lack of consistency in terminology on the internet, electronic databases and library online catalogues. This therefore creates an inefficient and time wasting experience.
A diagrammatic representation of how normal www/internet searching is carried out is shown in FIG. 1, wherein a user 1 uses a search engine such as Google 2 to search the whole of the web 3 using keywords or the like.
There are many concerns of undergraduates, postgraduates and academics when commencing academic research. Four major concerns are; efficiency of research methodologies, comprehensiveness of research materials available, the volume of research previously undertaken and the time involved in research using electronic media. When searching the internet the academic researcher, student or general public will encounter a lot of information that is related to commercial products or information that is either not correct or holds bias. Additionally, information seekers searching on the internet results in so many ‘hits’ they find it impossible to sort through the large amount of material that presents itself as well as trying to avoid commercial web sites of which are in the majority. However, the amount of valuable and up-to-date information on many government and non-government organizations, university, research institution and education websites is increasing and thereby provides additional information that is useful for the researcher or information seeker.
Increasingly, universities are enrolling many international students in their courses. In Australia international students make a large contribution to Australia's Gross National Product (GNP). Research shows that some of the key challenges for international students are: language, library systems and technology however, academic research provides substantial evidence that language is the primary challenge. International students whilst sometimes not having a firm grasp on English encounter difficulties in determining the core concepts of their subjects and there is the added complexity that academic literature is often written in the three dialects of English, American-English and Australian-English. Additionally, there is also the matter of idioms, colloquialisms and dialect which also compounds their comprehension problems. With the compounding factors of unsure English comprehension and language skills, international students tend to use information seeking tools such as Google® or some other freely available computer internet web site that is familiar or easy to use. However, they also experience the same difficulties as all information seekers, and that is their need to find information that suits their needs and to also find it quickly and easily.
Although using electronic media and the internet for research is often assumed to be efficient and easy, the breadth of information and the design of the interrogative technology found in many electronic search systems can become substantially complex. Therefore, in order to simplify the identification of search terms, the information seeker must be able to identify core concepts and develop a strategy to effectively retrieve information. For the experienced researcher this may not be difficult but for the novice researcher or international student, it can be quite onerous, fraught with materials that are inadequate or provide results that can divert the researcher from their required path.
The higher education sector expects students to have a modicum of experience (if not basic) of research skills before entering university. Accordingly, these skills are expected to be taught to students at high school or college level beforehand. However, it appears that there is a shortfall in students skill upon commencing university.
Related prior art uncovered during searches includes: US Patent Application Number US-2005/0065947-A1 (HE et.al.) 24 Mar. 2005, U.S. Pat. No. 6,523,001 (CHASE) 18 Feb. 2003, U.S Pat. No. 6,256,605 (MACMILLAN) 3 Jul. 2001, PCT Application Numbers WO-1999/034307 (INFODREAM CORPORATION) 8 Jul. 1999 and PCT/US98/27664, 28 Dec. 1998 (Andleigh et al.). each of which are discussed below.
Patent number US-2005/0065947 (HE et.al.) entitled ‘Thesaurus Maintaining System and Method’ is specifically a maintenance of thesaurus system that starts with a ‘plurality of computers’ and ends at a database. HE et al provides a different focus and application, directed to a thesaurus generation process. HE et al. is directed to the problem of databases not being able to find information because of misspellings.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,523,001 (Chase) entitled 'Interactive Connotative Thesaurus System is similar to other digital thesaurus programs such as the aforementioned patents. Chase discloses a thesaurus designed to associate positive or negative emotions and feelings to the connotative synonyms.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,256,605 (MacMillan) entitled ‘System for and Method of Summarizing Etymological Information’ is a computer system for summarizing English language etymological information that is in a database. The MacMillan citation uses only single words which the user may find in the database and that database provides etymological roots and origins of those words. The thesaucratic database consists of phrases, common sayings, dates and proper nouns and does not provide any other information. The MacMillan invention is not intended for www or internet searching, and does not provide any of the elements of the thesaucratic database nor provide any elements of a teaching or instructional nature. MacMillan is a reference tool that that retrieves synonyms from digital text materials and saves them into a database. The database will use those connotative synonyms in matching terms in other digital text materials in order to match both sets of terms.
Patent number WO 99/34307 8 Jul. 1999 (INFODREAM Corporation) entitled ‘Extraction Server for Unstructured Documents’. This is a ‘system for analyzing and extracting words and word groups from an electronic document and for storing those extracted words into a target database’ that is later accessed in order to ‘match’ words in the stored and scanned documents.
None of the citations provide an online component or access the www and internet for searching, nor do they act as a teaching tool for all users, nor do they consist of core subject concepts, nor do they deliberately consist of contemporary natural language in the three dialects of English being English-English, Australian-English or American-English, nor do they provide help assistance with the basic principles of information seeking, or the requirements of academic referencing requirements, nor do they provide an opportunity for users to have a personalized folder to save bibliographic or url references, nor do they provide assistance with learning and instruction. Additionally, they also do not provide all this whilst being a tool to search on the internet with default domain restrictions whilst the system is customable to all users whether they be for personal, educational or corporate use.
Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.